Strange breakthrough in 30-year-old murder case

Dennis Melvin Howe, right, the suspect in the murder of Sharin’ Morningstar Keenan is shown in an age-enhanced sketch. Bob Miller, left, claims to have met the killer.Otto Kitsinger
/ National Post

Bob Miller poses for a photograph in his Nampa, Idaho appliance repair shop on Thursday, July 18, 2013. He bears a striking resemblance to Dennis Melvin Howe and has written bizarre accounts on the fate of the man he says is the real fugitive.Otto Kitsinger
/ National Post

Bob Miller opens the duffle bag he says contains the possessions of a killer.Otto Kitsinger
/ National Post

For 30 years, a Reginaborn drifter somehow eluded one of the largest manhunts in Canadian history despite his face becoming part of the urban landscape -on billboards, posters and newspapers. Named as the sole suspect after a missing nine-year-old girl tumbled dead from a refrigerator in his Toronto flophouse, Dennis Melvyn Howe became a figure of outrage and fear and then a man of mystery.

Now, an appliance repairman in Idaho says Canadian authorities think he may be Dennis Howe, and police confirm his claim.

The National Post has learned Toronto police have asked the FBI to confirm the identity of Robert James Miller and to assure detectives the quirky repairman and passionate art lover is not actually the man wanted in the 1983 death of Sharin' Morningstar Keenan.

Toronto police have an outstanding arrest warrant for Howe on a charge of first-degree murder and are awaiting news from the FBI, confirmed Det.-Sgt. Steve Ryan, head of the force's cold case squad.

"They told the FBI that I'm Dennis Melvyn Howe; the Canadians did. That's what the FBI told me when the FBI came out and fingerprint me and all the bulls---they went through," Miller, 69, of Nampa, outside Boise, told The National Post in July.

Miller owns a cluttered appliance repair shop and says he owns paintings by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. He also bears a striking resemblance to Howe and has written bizarre accounts on the fate of the man he says is the real fugitive, claiming he turned Howe over to authorities 15 years ago and he was secretly killed by vengeful investigators.

"I'm definitely not Dennis Melvyn Howe. I'm the one who turned him in," he said, when approached by the Post.

"If I'm Dennis Melvyn Howe I don't see any reason in the world why they wouldn't be after me by now," he said.

"I'd have been out of here."

FBI agents arrive at shop Two weeks ago, two FBI agents came to his shop, which is attached to the house he shares with his Canadian wife. They had a dossier from Toronto police on Howe, including what he might look like now, based on age-enhanced imagery, he said.

"They changed his face, made it look completely different. How they can say that is (the) elderly enhanced face of Dennis Melvyn Howe is beyond me," Miller said, laughing loudly. "I guarantee he wouldn't look like that if he was still around."

The aged photos look an awful lot like Miller.

The FBI agents took Miller's photo, fingerprints and a copy of his birth certificate, he said. They asked him a lot of questions and left. A week later, he said, they called and said they had a few more questions.

He has not yet heard back. The FBI declined to discuss Miller: "I am not able to provide you with any information on an ongoing investigation. I can't even confirm if we have an ongoing investigation," said Debbie Bertram, spokeswoman for the FBI's area office. Calls and emails to the agent who left his business card with Miller went unanswered.

The interest in Miller and his claims on Howe's death give new life to the mystery of Sharin's 1983 death. Miller calls it "a heinous crime," and, in that at least, everyone agrees.

On Jan. 23, 1983, Sharin' asked her mother, Lynda Keenan, if she could play in Jean Sibelius Park in Toronto's Annex neighbourhood. She was told to come home in half an hour. She never did.

Days later, after a public search, Sharin's body was found when a detective opened the refrigerator in the apartment rented by Howe at 482 Brunswick Ave. She had been raped, strangled, and stuffed into a garbage bag.

The question of who killed Sharin' has been in little doubt for detectives: Howe had rented the apartment, he disappeared after the murder, his fingerprints were in the apartment and his genetic material on Sharin's remains.

The mystery became how he evaded capture - not only during the immediate, massive manhunt but also in the 30 years since.

Police believed he fled Toronto, taking a bus to Winnipeg, while Sharin' was still a missing person.

There have been suspected sightings over the decades.

A dentist thought he had Howe in his chair undergoing treatment and called police. When officers arrived, they arrested the patient, who turned out not to be Howe but a man wanted on unrelated charges.

Howe had stayed in Lafleche in the late 1980s, a local resident told police. Someone else thought a dishwasher at a mining camp in Saskatchewan looked like Howe. Another thought a housekeeper at a Calgary hospital was a dead-ringer, right down to chain smoking Players cigarettes and calling things "turkeys," two of Howe's traits.

In 1999, officials went so far as to exhume a body from a cemetery in Sudbury, Ont., in the mistaken belief it was Howe's remains buried under a pseudonym. Someone with a similar description but using the stolen identity of Peter Sanderson died in Sudbury in 1988. The real Mr. Sanderson, who went into Liberal politics, had lost his wallet in Winnipeg in the early 1980s.

Miller says he knew Howe Many believe Howe must be dead.

It seems unlikely that someone who spent most of his adult life before Sharin's murder in prison for one

crime after another could avoid legal trouble for the next 30 years. If he was arrested in North America, a fingerprint or DNA check would likely alert Canadian authorities, whatever name he was using.

When the Internet came of age, cyber sleuths highlighted the search for Howe, breathing new life into the case.

But there was one man who claimed to know exactly what happened to Howe.

In 2008, Miller, under the username Vanrijngo, wrote two lengthy posts on UnsolvedCanada.ca, a web forum devoted to unsolved murders in Canada.

"Sharin' Morningstar Keenan. Please remember that name," the first post, with many typos, began.

Miller then wrote how, in 1998, he was watching an episode of America's Most Wanted, once a popular TV show about wanted fugitives, featuring Howe.

He recognized the description, he said, as a drifter originally from Canada who was staying in a Boise homeless shelter. He had hired him to do odd jobs around his short-lived art gallery in Boise. The drifter went by the name Tommy Ross.

"He looked like he had a lot more on the ball than having to stay at a homeless shelter," he wrote. The two became casual friends. Once, he said, Ross called him a "turkey."

He called a crime hotline and turned Ross in, Miller said. Shortly after, he spotted two mysterious men near his gallery, one with a bulge at his waist suggesting a concealed handgun, he said. He said as a former soldier in the U.S. Army, he recognizes sidearms. (The U.S. military could not confirm to the National Post whether Miller had served.) 'Wide conspiracy' He claims he later recognized the two men from a TV documentary on Howe as retired detectives who had worked on Sharin's case. Miller said the man he thinks was Howe, "more than likely (became) bear food in a primitive area in the tundra, most likely from a fall on his way back to Canada from an airplane."

He believes authorities in both countries engaged in "a wide conspiracy" to take justice into their own hands.

Bizarrely, he imagines Ross falling from 30,000 feet - "quite possibly being fully nude" - and in his last moments being able to "think about his crimes on his way down."

He said he still has the luggage the drifter left at his gallery. When asked to show it, he rustled around his shed and house, hauling out a tattered duffle bag, pulling out soiled clothes.

"I had all his clothes, his toothbrush, his hairbrush, everything. They could have DNA'd everything. I still got it for my own protection because, the way I look at it, someone is going to want to get rid of me," he said.

But turning Ross in "backfired on me," he said.

It certainly did. His strange tale attracted attention not to the purported death of Howe but to who

Miller was and whether he might really be the wanted man.

Both men would be about the same age, are close in height and physically similar. Both are left handed. Both were once heavy smokers and handy with machines. Both seem to be smart but not particularly well educated. Sharin's murder is the only subject outside of art that Miller writes about publicly.

Miller being married to a Canadian woman from Toronto also gives him a tie to the city, although he said they met in California and married in the late 1960s and that he has "never, never, never," been to Canada.

Meanwhile, a current Toronto resident, who has followed the murder case from the start because it happened not far from his home, noticed the similarities between Miller to Howe and notified Toronto police. He has asked that his name not be published.

Miller displays a mix of frustration, dark humour and cockiness about the comparison. On his blog, he provides a link to the websleuths.com discussion group on the search for Howe, labeling it: "Forum for fools still looking for this killer."

He said even friends and family wondered about him.

Admitting he is a bit "paranoid," he suggested he might become a victim of those involved looking to cover their tracks.

"I know there is no place I could hide where they couldn't find me or have me found," he wrote online a few weeks ago. "So I will just hang out here in my little o'l town of Nampa, Idaho, and see if they come around to silence me."

And he has. That is where the National Post found him, behind the counter of Miller Appliance and Refrigeration, jovial and welcoming.

'What is going to happen next' If he is a fugitive, he is a confident one. He speaks openly and engagingly of the police interest in him and welcomed a photographer to take pictures. During a tour of his place, he pulled a book off the shelf to retrieve an old newspaper clipping. Between the book's covers was a hollow cavity containing a shiny handgun.

Yet his humble circumstances cast doubt on his claim to personally own paintings by some of the world's best-known and highly sought after artists. He remains disdainful of the world's art experts, because they have not embraced him or his collection as anything close to authentic.

His own assessments of art are also unusual. He has written about hidden images of dead monkeys secretly painted into the canvas of Rembrandt's famous works.

He laughs when it is suggested he is a bit of an odd duck. He doesn't disagree. But he is not a killer, he said; he is not a fugitive nor a criminal and certainly not Dennis Melvyn Howe.

"I'm just wondering what is going to happen next," he said.

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